Now if you asked the bespoke "film crew" at the LA Times to come up with the 25 films that best represent their city, you'd expect that list to be pretty definitive, right? You'd assume, for instance, that Chinatown would be somewhere on the chart - and possibly at the top.

Assume again. Admittedly, the LA Times does indeed find room for a Los Angeles-based movie about a sinister billionaire, a corrupt police force and the luckless, dogged investigator who gets in their way. It's simply that this movie is not Chinatown. It's Fletch.

Fletch - an insipid 80s comedy starring the exquisitely self-satisfied Chevy Chase - is one of several curious inclusions on the chart. Another is LA Story, which features Steve Martin as a lovestruck TV weatherman - the big joke being that there's not much call for a weatherman in sunny southern California. We can only suppose that it is here at the expense of another film that implicitly addresses themes of love and TV stardom in modern-day LA: Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.

OK, full disclosure. When I embarked on this post I shamefully ignored the first rule of journalism: Read the Goddamn Headline! It transpires that the LA Times list actually collates the top 25 films of the past 25 years. This naturally disqualifies Chinatown from inclusion. It also explains the absence of other obvious contenders like The Big Sleep, American Gigolo and The Graduate.

To think that I had been half-applauding the contrary nature of the paper's selection. I had even started to wonder whether there were some more refined criteria at work. The list seemed to put forward a fascinating case, arguing that a bad movie set in Los Angeles can actually tell us more about the city than a good one, in the same way that you might argue that an episode of MacGyver shines more light on the American psyche than, say a novel by Don DeLillo (actually, substitute "an episode of MacGyver" for "a box-set of the Simpsons" and I'd probably agree).

Still never mind; all things to dust. In the meantime, what do you make of the list? Yes, there are some classic LA pictures here (Mulholland Drive, The Big Lebowski, Repo Man, Devil in a Blue Dress). But which ones are missing? The Player is included when Short Cuts would surely have made a better choice. Is Michael Mann's Collateral a more insightful portrait of the place than his earlier Heat? Why no placing for Todd Haynes's Safe, a drama that brilliantly encapsulates the malaise at the heart of suburban LA?

Yes, I realise that Los Angeles is far and away the most filmed metropolis on the planet and that many worthy contenders are therefore destined to fall by the wayside. But what in your view are the most glaring omissions on this list? What films best catch the peculiar, dislocated spirit of modern-day LA, that "constellation of plastic", those "19 suburbs in search of a city"? Which films take its temperature better than Steve Martin does? And please, somebody explain, because now I've begun thinking about it I genuinely want to know: might it be possible to argue that Fletch is a more illuminating LA story than Magnolia, or indeed Chinatown?